


Ring Exchange

by SpaceAsthmatic



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: BAMF Legolas Greenleaf, Canonical Character Death, Family Angst, Family Bonding, Family Feels, Family Reunions, Fic Graveyard, Ghosts, Gift Exchange, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Battle, Post-War of the Ring, Prince Legolas, Protective Legolas Greenleaf, Rings of Power, Sad with a Happy Ending, War of the Last Alliance, War of the Ring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:22:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23406691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceAsthmatic/pseuds/SpaceAsthmatic
Summary: After the war of the ring is won, and the ring has been melted to nothing. Legolas gets drawn to the Dead Marshes by an impossibly familiar force.
Relationships: Oropher & Legolas Greenleaf
Comments: 5
Kudos: 169





	Ring Exchange

Legolas used his ‘three-minute rule’ to determine when it was an appropriate time to leave the camp. Technically, the three-minute rule was Ferdan’s but Legolas had adopted it readily countless years ago. 

The three-minute rule was as follows: If you stand in the same place for three entire minutes and nobody finds you in that time for a task, of there is a matter you wish to attend to, you may now do so. 

If anybody decides to want you after that will simply have to track you down. 

And so he stood at the edges of the camp and watched them all mill around, singing a song in his head that he knew to be around three minutes long or so. Watching all of the mortals bumbling around into one another like bee’s, drunk on the glowing warmth of their relief and joy. 

Legolas’ heart was drunk off a different and much darker liquid, something much more aged and tired of this world. 

He waited until the song in his head was done and then as fast as he could, vanished from the sight of the camp. Not because he thought that the humans would notice, or even Gimli or Aragorn at this time. The twin sons of Elrond, however, were irritatingly observant. And persistent if they were intrigued. 

They were like two flys determined to get a taste of your dinner no matter how many times you swatted them away. 

There were few to no tree’s around for him to use as cover, but nonetheless he was fairly certain that Elladan and Elrohir had not noticed him, probably too busy with their little brother. 

Legolas felt a pull reaching into the depths of his heart as noticeably as the instinct to gag at the stench drifting to his nose. Both of them calling him forward in their own unique way. He choose to follow the direction of his heart, as he did with almost everything no matter who complained about it.

His eyes quickly watering, not from the smell but at the family familiarity of the soul that guided his steps, becoming all the more familiar the more Legolas welcomed it into his heart. How it could ever possibly feel familiar was beyond reason, as the two of them had never walked Arda at the same time. 

Even though the real soul had long since abandoned Arda, the echo of its presence held the same unmoving strength Legolas has grown to associate with absolute comfort. Absolute comfort because the echo spoke of the same brand of strength that sped through Legolas’ own blood and body. 

Quicker than he thought, the marshes began to stretch out before him. He cast his eyes around the surface but didn’t slow his steps. The tingling in his feet growing stronger when he turned them towards safe passages. Safe passages meaning a way that would not be interrupted by terrible monsters of flesh and bone that had made the marsh their home. 

Other than that, he did not care which way he went. 

He didn’t care about wet feet or even wet legs. The dark spirits that had been trapped under the water’s surface had been culled into the void with their master, the only souls left lingering now would not hurt him. 

In fact, it felt as though they did the exact opposite. It felt as though hands were pushing up on the bottoms of his feet until he was practically walking on the surface. The waters rippling with the smiles of Ulmo as he blessed the Woodland Prince’s passage. 

Legolas continued to let his heart guide him where he needed to go. The only place in the world that his Ada didn’t know how to get to, and not from lack of effort or attempts. According to his Uncle Ferdan, Thranduil had spent nearly every spare hour he was allowed to have searched the battlefield before they went home. 

Even as the unmeasurable amount of bodies began to decay grotesquely, he searched for his father. 

Never found him. 

Legolas slogged through the swamp, his mind trying so hard to think of everything but nothing all at once. He wasn’t sure which would be better and was now stuck between the two options. But still, he traveled relentlessly onward. 

Until like some sort of brittle branch, the connection that drew him forward snapped without ceremony. He had arrived. This was the spot. 

The spot his grandfather had died, the spot where he had been left to rot away from all things that grew. Left to swim in these murky waters with all assortments of evil creatures. He stood there, stock-still and unmoving as the thought slowly sank in deeper to his emotions. 

A breeze caressed his face and gently blew all the foul odors away from his face while filling the air with the smell of fresh flower fields. 

Legolas fell to his knees with a sob so deep he almost could not believe such a sound could have ever come from him. 

For some time Legolas was unable to move or do anything other than continue to kneel and let the sobs overtake him. A glowing white and blond speck in a never-ending maze of dark marshland

Potentially the purest thing this land had ever seen. 

Legolas knew that trying to find this place would affect him. He just did not think it would affect him this much. How could standing over the spot where a grandfather you had never met was killed knock him down to such pathetic rubble? 

Even as he asked himself that, his mind continued to reply horrible images conjured from the snippets of information Legolas had gathered about Orophers’ death. His mind swam with the desperate sound of Thranduil’s open and hysterical begs for his father not to leave him. His mind could almost feel the warmth of blood as it seeped out of his grandfather, and onto his father’s clothes. Taste the choking desperation in the air. 

He could almost feel so much, see so much. 

Veins boiling with angry blood, face streaked with tears and a heart aching for a life he could have lived had it not been for what happened on this spot. This exact spot. The nostalgia for something that never actually happened cutting him in half like a knife. 

Here was where his grandfather was killed. Here is where his father became a king. Here is where is mother’s fate was sealed for having the audacity to love somebody who possessed such a threat to the enemy. For wanting to protect her child. 

Around him and in the water he could feel the snippets and pieces of the rest of the Silvan elves’ trapped souls, and he reached out to them with palms open and fingers spread. Smiling a little when he felt the slightly tickling sensation of them rubbing around his hands like excited guppies. 

“We won.” He told them all, not just Oropher. “We finally won, the ring is destroyed and its master along with it. It’s okay now, you don’t have to worry. You don’t have to watch over.” 

He had no idea where the idea even came from to put his hands in the water and search the murky ground below him for something. He wasn’t even aware of what exactly he wanted, but judging by how his hands were scrambling to find it he assumed that it was important. 

And then his finger brushed over something cool and smooth. Moreso than any rock or metal could ever hope to be, and filled with too much good energy to be anything armor or weapon-related. He swished his hand around to further dislodge the object and made sure to grab it tightly before it might have an opportunity to slip away from him. 

Pulling it closer to the surface, he dumped even more of the gunk out of his hand and cleaned off the object so that he would better be able to see it. It was much smaller than he had expected, considering how lodged it had become. 

In his hand sat a simply carved jewel ring, glittering with its new freedom. 

Legolas recognized it immediately as his grandfather Oropher’s, its partner belonging to King Thingol. The first rings either of them had managed to form and actually call a ring, after laughing themselves silly with attempts for weeks before the success. 

His father had told him Oropher never took it off. Not once. 

“What a loud little thing you are,” Legolas said to it, feeling his grandfathers and Thingol’s magic lingering in the ring. Had he not been so well versed in enchantments, Legolas might have been worried about the implications of this ring in this specific environment at this specific time. “Since I assumed you are the one that brought me here?” 

But he knew well how silvan enchantments worked, he knew how to tell if they had been corrupted or altered in any manner. The ring felt clean and clearer than a spotless window. This was not surprising, as Legolas suspected there were never few creatures who could have done anything to the ring without a significant collaborative effort. 

He inspected the ring more closely, finding the small mazework of cracks that zagged throughout the jewelry, making it look far more fragile than it really was. 

He had been told it was from the night Thranduil had been burned by the dragon, and that in his haste to do anything to help his son Oropher’s hands were badly burned. Enough that a charmed crystal had cracked under the pressure of the temperature change. 

He had never really had any heirlooms of their family. Such things were often impossible when you kept getting run out of your cities while simultaneously being slaughtered like sick cattle. He took another few minutes to admire it further, one of his grandfather’s most prized possessions. 

Legolas slid it onto his finger slowly, eyes widening when it almost seemed to ‘click’ to him like a missing piece of himself or his life. It probably was, a fraction of a piece when it came to building his blood family into his life. 

But now at least he would have this fragment of his grandfather to keep with him until he was able to meet the real thing. And have a more permeant solution to this aching void yawing its maw within him. 

After twirling it around his finger several more times he stood and began to make his way back out of the swamp and towards camp. When he got to the edge of the water but before he stepped out, Legolas turned back to cast his eyes around the space. 

Running the thousands and thousands of names that had been lost in the battle that took his grandfather through his head. His mind’s eye flipping through the pages of his father’s list of the deceased. All of them taken too early and most of them still leaving apart of themselves lingering here. 

He had to smile at the sheer stubbornness of his people though, proof that nothing had changed about them. They had not been able to win the war and so they decided to simply not leave until after they had the satisfaction of watching somebody else do so. 

Legolas tried his best to cast himself about the huge space so that all of them could feel that he was the grandson of their King who had stayed with them. He wanted them to know that he would not let their people’s sacrifices go unnoticed or unheard. He wanted them to know that he saw them, really saw them. 

He glowed with the impression that it was okay to leave now, that they should leave now to the best of his abilities, “I just wanted to thank each and every single one of you from the bottom of my heart and the depths of the skies. Thank you for all that you did, thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you for everything.” 

He waited until his voice stopped skipping across the surface of the water, leaving ripples behind as it went. The marsh held its breath in complete silence, waiting for the prince to speak again.

“You can go rest now.” 

With that, Legolas stepped out of the water and as it had held its breath, the world took a collective exhale and the pieces of sprits drifted off to find the rest of themselves. 

A sense of absolute and serene peace draped itself over the swamp, the kind that you can only find within the deep recesses of a forest. The air lingered with countless scents of all kinds of trees, shrubs, and flowers. Exactly none of which grew anywhere close to these cursed lands. 

Then, like a final goodbye, all the nearby woodland animals raised their voices to sing their souls off to peace. Each note lingering with crystal-like clarity in the air until it found all of the souls to wish goodbye.

Twisting his new ring on his hand, Legolas continued to make his way back to camp. 

How ironic that he should find the only ‘ring’ of consequence to his people the same day all other rings lost their powers. 

Legolas could not help himself but laugh good and long at the irony in the situation, absently he twirled the ring on his finger as his high spirits kept him floating home. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for coming and reading, I hope that you loved reading if as much as I loved writing it!  
> Would love to hear from you! 💛💛


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